Travelling back from ACCU conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the insights that I’ve brought back with me is from Kevlin Henney’s talk Procedural Programming: It’s Back? It Never Went Away. It’s surprisingly simple but surprisingly insightful, and it has to do with early return statements. Early return statements are controversial in the programming […]
When we put a piece of code into a unit test, sometimes we need to hammer it into a shape that fits into a test harness. A typical example is for cutting dependencies: the function we’d like to test depends on UI, a database, or just something really intricate that our test binary can’t link […]
C++ supports default parameters, but with some constraints. We’ve seen that default arguments had to be positioned at the end of a function’s parameters, and also that default parameters are interdependent: indeed, to provide a non-default value to one of them, you have to also pass a value to those that come before it. We’ve […]
Over the posts of the series on default parameters, we’ve come across two constraints of default parameters in C++. The first one is that all the default parameters have to be at the end of the arguments list of a function. This can make an interface less natural, because arguments are no longer grouped in […]
There is a particular case for default parameters: it’s when their type is a template type. Even though the idea is similar to the regular default parameters, there are some subtleties that are worth mentioning. To illustrate this, I will use the example of map_aggregator, the output iterator for aggregating data into a map, for […]
“Should I use overloads or default parameters”, haven’t you asked yourself that question? When designing an interface where the user can leave the value of an argument up to the API, two approaches are possible: Using a default parameters: void drawPoint(int x, int y, Color color = Color::Black); And using overloading: void drawPoint(int x, int […]
Even though default parameters are simple to understand for their basic usage, there are many things to know to make the most out of them. Like, really many. To explore various aspects of this vast topic, let’s start a series of post dedicated to the topic: Default parameters in C++: the facts (including the secret […]
The comma operator is a curious operator and seldom used, but it happens to encounter it in code. And sometimes by mistake. Such encounters can give a hard time understanding the code. For this reason it is useful to know what it does, and what it doesn’t do. This article is not made to show […]
Today’s guest post is written by guest author jft, as a sequel to his previous article How to Convert a String to an int in C++. In this post, jft presents the performance analyses he conducted to find out which method is fastest to extract numbers from a string. Interested in writing on Fluent C++ […]
Today’s guest post is written by guest author jft. In this article, he presents us a thorough comparison between the various ways C++ offers to extract number from a string. You will see how they differ from each other in terms of features as well as in term of ease of use in code. Interested […]
